I think I'd start with the language itself.I think mostly important is that it should important a lots of r-s, k-s, t-s and some German letters like ä ö and ü. Also, it would contain lots of consonats.

I meant something like those (few characters from Hungarian rune writing):

Cool idea. They look like human runes - perhaps because drawn with a brush? I think dwarves would use stone carving tools or work in near-molten stones and crystals.How will the runes be used? For example create a FreeType font that gets downloaded as a add-on resource and shows up in dialogs, or use them as an offline reference when making graphics like portraits and scenario intros.

Nice, i think that if you make them almost indented (using shadows or something, i'm no artist so you'll have to try some techniques ) then they will look more like dwarvish runes! Also glowing runes might be cool!

Here is a example picture of a rune by skeptical troll, edited by addem shem:

glowing runes

Here is a rune carved in a rock:

carved runes

Also if you put your runes on a map, or picture of old parchment that would be cool alternative! (like the map at the start of the hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien) (if you make your runes so that they have a transparent background then you can put them on the wesnoth maps!)

map runes

You might not want to carve your runes in rocks or make them glow and thats fine!

I started with the cultural background. I wanted to stay less complicated, so I limited the number of runes in the set. This might prove ill, since this runeset is not enough to write all dwarvish Wesnothian names. But it was made more like for general in-game-dwarf purposes.

The main element in the dwarvish universe is earth (not as the planet or soil, but as the element, everything that is below surface). All things rise from the earth and later join it again. There are four main substances that interact with dwarves: metal (metals, alloys and ores), stone (rocks, minerals), gem (gems, crystals, jewels) and fuel (coal, gas, oil).Each of them is extremely important for dwarvish culture and life. Each one has a field of dwarvish existance priorities. These are life, death, wealth and honour. Fuel supports life, gems bring wealth, metal earns honour and stone takes the dead. At the rune scheme, it would be represented as arrows from the outer rectangle to the inner rectangle and from the inner to earth and from earth to all the outer substances.

The substances and existance elements also interact with each other. Fuel turns to gems (mostly the diamond synthesis from coal), gems buy metal (armours, weapons etc.), metal becomes stone (rusting) and stone shelters fuel (mining). That would be represented as counterclockwise arrows in the outer rectangle. As four the inner ones, it's a clockwise relation. Life ends in death, death gives honour, honour brings wealth, wealth supports life.

These relations give us a scheme of the 9 main runes:

I am quite bad at digital arts so the ratios and the syle is only roughly what I meant, but you get the idea of the shapes. Also, the circles and circleparts could be chenged to rhombi and lines respectively.

These runes represent consonants, the main part of dwarvish language. As in most non-analytic languages, dwarvish could use radicals. A radical is a set of consonants that does not change in related words. The vowels might then be represented as diacritic marks. I used four vowels: a, i, u and h. Yes, h would be a vowel that comes after a consonant, eg -kh-, -gh-, -dh-. So far I used | for a, = for i, ^ for u and / for h. The vowel symbol is added on the rune of the consonant it comes after. If there are two vowels in a row, the second is represented as its symbol placed on an x.

That much so far. I also have made a possible dwarvish counting system model fragment if anyone is interested.

I know it lacks some letters to suit Wesnothian dwarf name writing task. Mainly t, f, and s. Knowledge could be added among the inner circle, not sure about its substance.

As for the runes, they are stylized versions of things relted to the rune meaning.